2309: plato: a nickname Apr 12, 2021
While most people are familiar with the name of Plato and his school of thought Platonism, fewer people would be familiar with Aristocles. This is not only the same person but in fact Plato, or Platon as he called himself comes from πλατύς (platýs), but this is a nickname from the same root as led to the English 'plateau' and 'place' meaning 'broad' relating to having broad shoulders. Aristocles means son of Ariston.
2308: Nuns vs Sisters Apr 11, 2021
Christian nuns and sisters (in the ecclesiastical sense) may have more or less the same roles, they actually are different. Nuns take solemn vows while religious sisters take simple vows, one main difference of which is that sisters can own property and other capital. This means they are free to make endeavors in certain vocational areas like charity, education, and health. Nuns—the term for which comes from the Latin 'nonna': literally (female) monk—tend to live in the enclosure of an order and are not involved in those affairs.
2307: druid Apr 10, 2021
Before the word 'magician' there was 'druid'. More accurately, there was the Old English 'dry', which later became 'druid'. Oddly, while 'magician' is ultimately of a Germanic root, 'druid' comes from a Celtic root as a name for the priest of Gaul, the Brittons, and Ireland. Still, the word did not come to English via contact with Celtics, but rather first through Latin. The root is ultimately from '*dru-wid-' meaning effectively 'strong seeing', but actually the root of the first element, '*deru-' means 'tree' or partially 'oak' and *weid- meaning 'to see', probably relating to auguring with plants like mistletoe which grow on those trees. Moreover, the early Germanic settlers to the British Isles had the same word for 'tree' as 'truth': treow. This was eventually replaced in English and now has a mostly historical and cult meaning.
2306: magic & machine Apr 9, 2021
Although magic and science don't have much to do with each other, 'magic' and 'machine' are etymologically related. Indeed, the Proto-Indo-European root includes not only words directly adjacent to those before like 'mage', 'magi' and 'mechanism', but also 'may' and its derivatives, along with 'might' (both senses). The root '*magh-' is estimated to have had the meaning of 'ability' or 'power'. 'Main' is also among these with this common root. The sense of 'magic' in a purely sorcerous sense really comes from the 14th century, though in the sense of being an illusionist by trade without any actual spiritual component, the early 19th century.
2305: mumbo-jumbo Apr 8, 2021
It's not entirely clear how the phrase 'mumbo jumbo' originated, it's most likely from the Mandinka people of West Africa. According to that understanding, it is from the word 'maamajomboo', meaning 'masked dancer', a role used in many for supernatural activities of the native culture who would sing and chant in gibberish. Alternatively, it might just be from English, as a somewhat exaggerated and fanciful pronunciation of 'mumble' plus 'jumble'.
2304: AZERTY & QWERTZ Apr 7, 2021
In addition to the English QWERTY keyboard, there is the French-language AZERTY layout, and the German and Slavic QWERTZ. Granted, many of those have variants to themselves, such as the Swiss keyboard—which is based off the German QWERTZ—but has special keys that either have German diacritics (ÄÖÜ) or French accented letters (ÀÈÉ), but usually for a languages special characters, they will be in the same place, with 2 keys to the right past (P), and 3 past (L).
In the beginning of the 20th century, many alternative keyboards were used but did not catch on in large part because while keyboards were not as widely used as today thanks to computers, the people who used them—mostly secretaries—were trained in QWERTY or AZERTY.
2303: sushi Apr 6, 2021
'Sushi' is the name of a general type of dish usually made with seafood, rice, and seaweed, but only one of these things is the reason for the name. It is actually adopted from the Japanese 寿司すし (sushi) unsurprisingly, but this means specifically "sour rice”, possibly related to 酸すい (sui) meaning “sour; vinegared”. This is because it was originally made by covering fish in fermented rice, which would then just be throw away, but when vinegar was later added to speed up the process, the rice could be edible, and much like pie-crusts, what was once just a gross coating for cooking or storage purposes, it became an integral part of the dish. Seaweed was added only around the 19th century.
2302: Nigromancy: A Deliberate Misspelling of 'Necromancy' Apr 5, 2021
Necromancy, sorcery surrounding interactions with the dead, is definitely a form of black magic, and that shows in the historical spelling of the name. 'Necro-' as a combining form is from Greek νεκρός (nekrós) meaning 'dead' as also found in 'necropolis' for instance. Nevertheless, in Middle English (nigromancy) and Medieval Latin (nigromantia) the spelling was obviously changed, and made to align more with the Latin 'niger' (black) to due a presumed—but etymologically erroneous—association with 'black magic'. The spelling was eventually changed to align with the Greek origin during the renaissance.
2301: galvanize Apr 4, 2021
When people talk about galvanizing, it is either in terms of inspiring action, or with covering one metal in a thin layer of another. Really though, the word originated from a name, Luigi Galvani. This French scientist experimented with electricity and is known for his experiment in which he caused frog-legs to twitch. This then got applied to the sense of energizing the spirit of a person.
2300: Rocky Origins of QWERTY Apr 3, 2021
The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, marketed as the Remington No. 1, saw the introduction of the QWERTY keyboard, so named for its arrangement of four rows of keys. in the order we are familiar with now around the globe. It was not until the Remington No. 2 however that this would gain any popularity. For one thing, it only had capital letters, and it was not possible to see what was being written as one wrote, known as a blind writer. It was also expensive and took training to operate, with all of these factors and generally poor marketing leading to a popular lack of enthusiasm. Still, the 1874 design did lay the foundation for its more successful successor, and now ubiquity among the adoption of its keyboard layout, at least with English. Other languages such as French will use different arrangements of keys for the same keyboard; in the case of French it is known as the AZERTY. In both cases, there were competitors who introduced other layouts, but these never caught on.
2299: Hebrew's Alternative Plus Sign: ﬩ Apr 2, 2021
Numbers in modern Hebrew writings, including in math equations, are written left-to-right, even though Hebrew is written right-to-left. This means that math and numerals in general are exactly the same as in Europe for instance, with one exception. The plus-sign, conventionally + for most places, is often written ﬩ as a sort of inverted capital T. This is because historically, the Jews using the symbol wanted to avoid writing something that resembled a Christian cross but even in secular settings now the symbol remains present.
2298: piker Apr 1, 2021
Seemingly unrelated to 'pike' would be the word 'piker', as in a miserly person, actually is related, but no one is quite sure how. Some hold that it goes by the sense of 'pike' as in a road, relating to the original sense of 'piker' as 'vagrant', though it has been written that in America at least it comes from the name of a county, Pike, Missouri. That said, the Middle English word 'piker' meant 'thief', in the sense of picking, which would be therefore at least not so directly related.
2297: turnpike Mar 31, 2021
The word 'pike' by itself refers to the point of a shaft, or often a whole spear, but it also led to 'turnpike'. The earlier, vaguer sense of the word was extended to any beam of wood, including those to make barricades for horses to keep them off certain roads. Eventually, this led to the sense of a toll on road, and the 'turnpike road' was just shortened to 'turnpike'.
2296: (New) Hebrew Stress Mar 30, 2021
Traditionally, Hebrew stress was almost always placed on the final syllable of the word, though there is a pattern which places it on the penultimate syllable. Increasingly however the stress is placed on the penultimate syllable outside of that aforementioned pattern, in general colloquial use, names, and loanwords. Previously, the stress was always predictable depending on syllable weight—i.e. the syllable length and whether the syllable had a coda—but the stress now is phonemic, insofar as it is now used to distinguish between words of different meanings, such as
/ˈboker/ (בּוֹקֵר)—"morning" /boˈker/ (בֹּקֶר)—cowboy
2295: Prosodic Stress Mar 29, 2021
In addition to the way that an individual word will have stress, stress in a sentence adds or indeed creates meaning. For instance:
[*x* indicating stress]
*He* didn't rob her (indicates someone else was a robber)
He didn't rob *her* (indicates someone else was robbed)
This sort of differentiation of meaning can be seen in practically any part of a sentences, even though the literal, structural form will be the same. This is known as prosodic stress since it is the prosody of the sentence which acts to add meaning. Any fun examples of this, write in the comments.
2294: Disfix Mar 28, 2021
There are many types of affixes, including ones which are not only additive, whether in the middle or on the ends [1]. One more for instance is the so-called 'disfix' which is a type of affix (such as in French a suffix) which is subtractive, meaning is causes a loss to the stem. Usually, this happens to the final segment of the stem, just before the disfix. For instance, with this pluralization from French:
bœuf (cow) as [bœf] --> bœufs (cows/cattle) as [bø]
such that the [f] is deleted in the plural. This also happens with adjectives such as
fausse (wrong (fem.)) as [fos] --> faux (wrong (masc.)) as [fo].
This process is common in certain North American native languages like Alabama, Choctaw, or other Muskogee languages.
2293: Secondary Stress Mar 27, 2021
Much like with personal matters, words can have not only primary but also secondary stress, especially in certain environments. As the name implies, there is a level of stress that most languages have that introduces phonetic distinctions, but there can also be a secondary level which is less extreme in its change of volume/pitch, but still has a function. In some languages like Hawai'ian or Estonian, this is a part built into every word or at least sentences no matter what, and is therefore predictable. In English, this not predictable, but common in certain structures such as with compounds where the first syllable has primary stress as in:
laundry-cleaner, where the first syllable of 'cleaner' has secondary stress. This makes it easier to determine when listening that there is indeed a compound rather than two distinct words.
2292: Ellipses around the World Mar 26, 2021
While the function of punctuation is the same across the board , there are many different styles that these take around the globe. In the case of ellipses (...), these are generally used to indicate that text is missing or otherwise abbreviated, and in German these are used even for an omitted letter. Sometimes the style is different, such as whether to include an exclamation point or question mark before as in the Russian (!..) (?..) or after. Japanese ellipses are elevated from the line instead and use 6 dots rather than 3; Chinese also uses 6 dots, but in 2 sets of 3 with a space. Other languages ditch the dots altogether and have separate symbols like in Thai (ฯ) or Laotian (ຯ). Mongolian, which in its traditional script writes top to bottom uses vertical ellipses of 4 dots (᠁).
2291: Stress in Tonal Languages Mar 25, 2021
It would be reasonable to assume that tonal languages, which already rely on changes in pitch to distinguish between words don't have stress or meter since those functions also involve volume, length, and even pitch. This assumption would be incorrect however. While it is true that these features are less relevant than in certain non-tonal languages, stressed syllables have been found in Mandarin for example by utilizing change in the fundamental frequency of the pitch (i.e. the swing in pitch of one individual tone) greater than that of the unstressed syllable, which would therefore have a more narrow change in pitch by itself.
2290: Simulfix and Transfix Mar 24, 2021
While suprasegmental patterns exist in order to distinguish between certain English nouns and verbs—e.g.rébel (n) - rebél (v)—this is not the only sort of suprasegmental morphology. For instance, these same patterns exist of course with strong verbs and strong nouns, like 'ring-rang-rung' or 'tooth-teeth' wherein the change is internal and is not only additional, unlike for instance the '-ing' suffix which removes no part of the root-word. This affix is known as a simulfix. Something similar exists within Semitic languages known as a transfix wherein a series of regular, patterned vowels (and at times, other consonants) are effectively inserted into meaningful templates of 2-4 (usually 3) consonants. Unlike with simulfix, the transfix is is attached to roots which cannot be used on their own, whereas the roots in languages that take a simulfix rely on existing phonemes that are usually but not always vowels.